Mark Waldron

Existence trumps nonexistence every time. It has all the colors and all the shapes and all the moves, it is rude in its bounty and its grotesque reach that overcomes all before it. This bit of stick I found in the park was showing off because the dead can’t have it. They can’t have any of it. It was sticky and prickled with a showy, dazzling presence, though it’s quietened a little now, now that I’ve taken it home and have it here on the mantelpiece. It has dressed in purple robes and carried its being like a chalice with such disarming mock-solemnity down and down the pale carved steps into its candlelit depths. Its being rests inside it now and purrs quite inaudibly with a sound like the most exclusive refrigerator, or a sound you might take for your own sovereign wheels spinning. Little stick. Wait for me. I’m coming.

what a saint you are, shining on everything, drawn to the world like flames are to moths, like honey to bees. So readily do you dole yourself out, and in such abundance so that we might operate our otherwise redundant eyes. For they’d be useless even as shiny bibelots that studded the otherwise dull surfaces of faces. No, in your absence, in that total darkness the eyes wouldn’t see or even be seen. And they would soon shrivel up and desiccate, die out from pointlessness like the little toe will (unless we can find a way to reverse its long decline). Hey, plump eyes! Isn’t it time you put your tiny wet hands together for the light!

On occasion, when the mood takes him as it so often does, he will put down his papers, get up from his kindly old chair, and leave for a while the sweeping beam to sow its charitable seed — that seed which, when falling on the ground of a helmsman’s fertile consciousness, ought germinate in it a cautious vigilance. He descends then, the long corkscrew of the stairs and opens at their base the metal door so that he may take a closer look at what might be beyond his tower’s environs. There he always finds the churning world, she laps at him from every side with no respite, and spatters him with spray. Thanks to a certain modulation, a tone which he adopted long ago when he still wore shorts and buckled shoes, there is no danger here from neither shark nor crocodile, not in this sea stuffed as it is like a dressing-up box with whimsy. Indeed, were there such creatures hidden neath the sliver-thin surface of the waves, they’d have no teeth but only soft gray gums and goofy grins, and they’d be giggling knowingly at the whole thing. And so it is that as he gazes out, he cannot help but wonder what it is he might be warning of with the light that turns atop his tower, because that tower is itself in fact the only hazard anywhere on which a ship might rip her wooden skin and haemorrhage her lumpy blood that’s made of all the gasping sailormen.

All the new birds are made of nothing. They have nothing inside (for anti-ballast) and those insides are surrounded in an outside nothing that has its own flibberti hole. The birds, they’re nothinging up there in the nothing trees, or on nothing roofs under a nothing sky. They fly of course, but what is flying if not nothing?

It’s summer, and just the sunniest of afternoons. Outside the sanatorium, in the arboretum, the attendees are served their teas. The strudel is toothsome when Herr Stumpf, from the lectern, contradicts the consensus that I is for ice cream. No, now he’s proposing that I’s for spaghetti, all spaghetti, he avers, being once alphabetti, all spaghetti being once that capital I that it is when it’s dry, not the maddening doodle that it is when it’s done and awry. His audience listen, but once he has spoken, then beneath their applause that’s not fulsome but token, they don’t soften, no rather, they stiffen.

I really do wish I did. Because if I loved lawnmowers I could go to the lawnmower museum I just heard about on the radio in a piece about small museums. It’s in Southport apparently — a seaside town “fringed to the north by the Ribble Estuary,” according to Wikipedia. It would be quite a trip to go up there, and I’d almost certainly have to stay the night. I think I might stay in the Prince of Wales Hotel, which looks conveniently situated for the station and the museum too. I can hardly bear to think how much I’d be looking forward to making that trip if I loved lawnmowers. On the radio they said they have all sorts of models from Victorian ones all the way through to a state-of-the-art robot one that’s powered by solar energy. If I was planning the visit I’d probably have a bit of a virtual walk-round on Street View, and in fact I’ve just done exactly that in an effort to capture the feeling I’d have if I was actually anticipating a trip to the lawnmower museum. Exploring the area I discovered that Southport looks very much like Weston-super-Mare, where, as it happens, I stayed in a halfway house many years ago after doing a stint in rehab. Now crack cocaine —that I loved.

are our spirits, these loquacious silver gods who glide at some safe distance above their rank and proletarian bodies. Foul though fascinating landscapes they are that they traverse, besmirched with armpits and fruity genitalia and belching gobs and those impulsive blurting sphincters in whose hot updrafts they might ascend and soar. O, but our spirits are so lustrous, so hairless, so advanced in their glass-bottomed flying machines which run on just about nothing! What quick and icy notions they have that slot into one another like the tightest clocks, and how they lick their lips as they gaze down in anticipatory glee, for though they would not themselves wish to rough it, they certainly will peep through their bedroom windows, each a jiggling voyeur of its own ardent body when that body has chanced upon another, and the pair of them have knuckled down to their immersive work.